Embedded Google OAuth is going to break
Update: Xamarin users who use the built-in auth will also be affected.
As of the 20th April 2017, Google will break your application’s Google OAuth if you’re relying on a UIWebView/WKWebView implementation on iOS or an WebView UI element on Android.
Just to clarify, you shouldn’t be doing this anyway, it’s a really hacky approach and as soon as Google had actual support for iOS and Android, developers should have instantly switched to an official approach 🙈
No one seems to be talking about it, but it’s going to have a relatively big impact on a lot of services. If this isn’t patched as soon as possible, they’re going to lose a lot of potential users.
The impact of this is going to be fairly widespread, a lot of services have never added support for the official approach so they’re going to be affected as of the 20th.
A few notable companies that will be affected by this if their team’s forget to update in the next fortnight are Pocket, Airbnb, and Quora.
If you run an iOS or Android app that relies on an embedded browser for Google OAuth, you should immediately hop into your IDE and implement the official approach, else if this is left unattended to, you’re going to lose a lot of potential users 👎
If you spot an application out in the wild that displays this behaviour, please notify their team of the problem as soon as possible, perhaps even link them to this article, just so that no one is left confused when their conversion rate drops unexpectedly.
